


nothing can touch you

by bugsuit



Category: The Batman (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 04:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1844275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bugsuit/pseuds/bugsuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you're going to become a concept, you might as well go all the way. There's no going back. (Written for my friend's birthday! Sorry/not sorry for the sadfic!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	nothing can touch you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thethrillof](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thethrillof/gifts).



You’re ten years old, and you come home with a grazed knee.

You tiptoe through the dim hall to the dingy kitchen and sneak the band-aids out of the cupboard to deal with it yourself, and your father catches you cleaning off the grit and tells you to man up. You don’t argue when he tells you it’s your own fault for being weak, but you want to. And someday you will. But right now you’re small and he’s big and he wins the arguments because of that, not because he’s clever. A debate means very little to someone taller and stronger. You learned this lesson at school as well as at home and right now it’s the most important one, because it’s the reason you got a grazed knee in the first place.

That night you curl up in your bed and you listen to the scratching in the walls and you decide if you ever invent anything of use it’ll be a rat trap that works. (This is a joke. You’ll do so much better than rat traps, and you’ll show everybody.)

[?]

You’re sixteen, and you’ve learned the art of casting glares that feel exactly like daggers.

No one looks at you in the corridors except to mutter, and that’s fine. You have straight As in all of your subjects and not through anyone else’s congratulation, which has taught you that opinions don’t matter. This is why you’re confident as you sit alone in your room that night and program a puzzle game by yourself on a stolen school laptop. No one will play it, and if they did they wouldn’t respect you for it. You don’t care. It’s the principle of the thing.

[?]

You’re eighteen, and you’ve never felt quite so free and wild and powerful.

You’ve been planning this for years. Saving up, the whole time. You played a dangerous game with the law because the thrill made you feel electric, but none of the money scams at the carnival job or the thefts around the city of jewels and cash made you feel quite like this. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning, and you step out of that damn apartment block into the rain and you don’t even bother holding your one small suitcase over your head to keep the rain off because you’re happy to let it soak you through to the bone. The damp air tastes like freedom and righteousness and smells nothing at all like rats and mould and you swear to yourself as soon as you get to your new place you’re calling pest control to give the place a look over just because you _can._ You already made sure there wouldn’t be rats. You’re mostly going to call them out of personal spite.

You grin into the rain and kick a street lamp on the way past just for the outlet because god damn it, you have so much _energy._ No one will see this side of you in class, mainly because you already left a year ago and passed everything with flying colours. _Edward Nygma, you have a few things to be proud of,_ you tell yourself, and for the first time it isn’t dampened by the shadow of your father.

The rain is the only thing to hear you laugh into the night air. You’ll leave him to wonder for a few days, if he even notices you’re gone.

[?]

You’re eighteen, and Julie is beautiful.

Everything is a learning experience but you never learned how to deal with this because there were no similar experiences and there’s nothing to draw from. She’s beautiful and it hurts to look at her. It’s like staring straight into the end of a welding torch – bright and blinding and painful and sort of feels like your face is burning off. You learn to hide the redness but you can’t learn to make the hurt stop, but it’s not the same kind of hurt as anything else. It makes you follow her with your eyes whenever she’s in the room and it makes you terrified to talk to her and your throat dries up, so right now, Julie has no idea who Edward Nygma is and maybe she never will! Maybe she never will. You won’t have the courage to ask her to prom, you’re a fool and an idiot and a moron and you’ve never used those words to describe yourself in your life so there _must_ be something wrong.

The professor assigns you as lab partners. If you believed in a higher power you’d be sacrificing goats.

[?]

You’re eighteen, and Julie is beautiful.

She recognised your genius, after that first session, and she keeps talking to you and asking your opinion and reminding you you’ve been working for eight hours straight ( _yes, that’s how you do things._ Okay, Edward, but remember you have a presentation tomorrow, and get some rest, okay? … _Okay.)_ and then one day she recognises the circuit you’re constructing and she asks, are you building a hard drive? You say yes. Sort of.

She looks at you and it’s with curiosity, not boredom, and you feel your heart flutter so, obviously, you tell her everything. Yes, it’s a hard drive. A hard drive that connects to your brain, that stores all the information you can’t keep in your head, it’s going to be revolutionary, Julie, you swear-

She says it’s brilliant.

You _feel_ brilliant.

[?]

You’re nineteen, and Julie is beautiful.

You tell her everything. Your childhood, your father, the things you invented, the things you destroyed, everything in between. (You leave out a few details, but that’s for her peace of mind, not yours.) And she _understands._

She understands. It’s enough to make your heart ache and your hands tremble and you never realised how valuable it was for someone else to understand until Julie did. You don’t regret telling her, like you regret telling the psychiatrist the Rorschach ink looked like a rat, or correcting your lecturer in front of 80 other students. Julie understands and everything hurts in a really good way, like the feeling coming back into your arm after sleeping on it for too long. Pins and needles, but all over your mind. It’s a good sign, maybe. Terrifying but cathartic. It’s the beginning of something great, you’re sure.

Julie buys the coffee. Neither of you want to get back to work after that confession of yours. You sit down in the university cafeteria and talk. They lock the doors around you but you reassure Julie you can pick the locks in under ten seconds if you have to and she gives you a weird look and then both of you laugh nervously. It’s the beginning of something great.

You have so much to look forward to and Julie lays her hand on top of yours and says she’ll be there. Trust is terrifying and wonderful all at once.

[?]

You’re nineteen, and the ring is nowhere near as beautiful as she is – but still perfect, you’re sure.

You polish it twice, and then you carefully press the cool band of metal down into the foam setting with a cloth over your thumb. You already know how not to leave prints on things, but for once this is for aesthetics, not to hide your tracks from the cops. The puzzle box clicks shut easily, and you spend two days rearranging it and re-rearranging it and not daring to open it up again to check on it in case it loosens the mechanism because you want it to feel perfect in her hands.

The ring is beautiful, but nowhere near as beautiful as she is.

[?]

You’re twenty-one, and you can’t think about Julie right now.

She didn’t believe you when you said it was perfect but that’s okay. It wasn’t your fault. Julie would agree if she knew, but even Julie isn’t perfect, she can’t know everything, it’s _fine._ It’s fine because if she knew everything she’d be on your side. You and her against the world. You can’t have that now. The best thing you can do for Julie is to leave her alone, and you understand that with a painful heaviness in your chest that you refuse to acknowledge head-on.

Life is a learning experience, and to put it poetically, you have learned to hate with all the fierce intensity of an imploding star. Glaring daggers won’t do much, but hate can burn you through hundreds of coffees and late nights, and tide you over months of planning, and it can fuel your courage while you’re paying strong people to help you with your dirty work with a time limit of _before he gets home from his business trip,_ and **hate** is why you’re planning to get rid of him. Permanently.

Hate is an upgrade from the resentment and disgust you felt for your father. Hate is an upgrade from glaring daggers at students in the high school corridors. Hate is an upgrade from being a nobody. …The discs were supposed to do that for you, for Julie, but Gorman ripped that away from you both so you’ll settle for hate as the next best leg-up in the world of being someone. You’ll become dangerous enough to make sure no one forgets your name.

You’re going to break the glass of water in your hand thinking about this, so you put it down and swallow the lump of terror and anger and wild trepidation in your throat and you start to tap out commands on the computer keyboard. Your eyes fix on the image of Gorman walking into his dark house. Your dark house, now.

A rat trap that works.

[?]

You’re twenty-four years old, and you still remember the look Julie gave you when that disc malfunctioned.

Maybe you’ll see her again someday, but you doubt it, somehow. And anyway, Julie won’t see Edward Nygma again, regardless of what happens - because Edward Nygma no longer exists. He’s gone along with the pins-and-needles feeling in your head that almost felt like hope, and honestly, you’re glad. Because this is easier. _Hate_ is easier.

You are concepts and metaphors and nothing can touch you, so it’s easier to do what you do. Build a team. A network, you find yourself calling it. Hunt down information ( _power_ ), then try to bring Gotham’s protector to his knees, as a couple of starters. These fail but even then all you are is shocked and angry, which is easier than shocked and angry and fearful, which is what Edward Nygma _would_ have been. There’s no room for that any more and everything is easier.

Everything. Even the first time you hear the word _Arkham,_ when Detective _Yinsie_ snaps it at you. It doesn’t even shake you. Not for a moment. You’d be impressed with yourself if you were still Edward Nygma, but the Riddler has no time for that, so you glare daggers at her briefly and put your carnie flourishes where your self-consciousness should be and you conduct the whole operation from then on with a smug feeling that you are _better_ than them.

The Bat ruins half of it, and Yin removes your backup. They both repulse you, but not as much as the look on Julie’s face back when-

Arkham isn’t scary to the Riddler.

[?]

You’re twenty-six, and here’s where it ends.

You are at the bottom of the bay, encased in rust like everything else you worked for and strived for and fought for, and you don’t even care. Externally you’re cold as a reanimated corpse and twice as hateful as all of the third-rate B-list movie zombies put together. You feel like one. And yet inside, there’s a part of you that can’t stop laughing. It’s caught in painful hysterics and can’t catch its breath and you can’t decide whether you want to stamp on it or let it take over. The Bat hits you, hard, and as you feel yourself flinch away from the shadow looming over you and covering what will be a bruise on your face, the hysterical part of you shrieks about your father and _what’s at the beginning that’s also at the end_ and lapses into another laughing fit that makes your face twitch with the effort of staying aloof.

The Batman can see you smiling as you explain why you’re done.

[?]

You’re twenty-six, and the Batman didn’t let it end there.

You’re still coming to terms with that. With the faint sense of… it’s not relief, you tell yourself firmly. There’s no such thing for you any more. It’s… a quiet acknowledgement that you still have time to make your mark on this city. (The Bat would call it a second chance. You agree, but not for the same white-knight reasons.)

You cast the name ‘Julie’ out of your memory. You’d put it on a bio-sensitive disc and throw it away if you could but _no wait stop. Stop._ …You just won’t think about Julie any more, or the university, or the university president who lent you eighteen pencils and reminded you to take breaks and _died_ because of you and because of _her._

Your face is still damp with _angry, hurt, weak_ while the police usher you into the back of the van. Your hands are cuffed, and if you reached up to dry your face you’re pretty sure they’d have you hit the deck. They’re all a little jumpy, but there’s no need for them to be, now.

You don’t care any more.

[?]

You’re twenty-six, and the ring is buried in a box in the corner of a warehouse along with all the other memories of Edward Nygma.

And you’re buried in your thoughts in a cell in the corner of Arkham Asylum along with all your mistakes. Maybe the childhood rat trap joke isn’t going to help you any more.

You feel sick. 


End file.
